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Sightline has a bunch of related article if you explore before and after links, but I'll call out two:
https://www.sightline.org/2012/12/03/emancipating-the-rooming-house/ on allowing rooming houses again (previous link is on their history), and Japan's capsule hotels as a modernized version of the old flophouse.
https://www.sightline.org/2013/01/16/servants-welcome-roommates-barred/ Perhaps the high point of a series on occupancy limits and how utterly unjustifiable they are.
Some quotes, not necessarily from those two articles:
(Racist hypocrisy of minimum space requirements) "you might expect sweeping changes in many kinds of crowded, residential buildings: military barracks, college dormitories, summer camps, prisons, single-family homes with many children, lumber camps, and crew quarters aboard ships. But the rule did not apply to these categories of housing. It applied only in neighborhoods where Chinese immigrants lived"
"In 1909, San Francisco banned most cubicle-style hotels, which was a common form of cheap lodging for itinerant workers and others on very tight budgets. The city rationalized the policy as a fire safety precaution. Had fire safety actually been the goal, the city would have demanded fire escapes, fire-slowing walls at certain intervals, and fire doors. Cubicles remained perfectly legal for offices and workshops across the city, but for sleeping? That became a code violation."
"The law now prohibits the demolition of any SROs that remain, while building codes make it impossible to build any new ones."
Why capsule hotels would be illegal here: "The “rooms” are much too small: habitable rooms may not be less than 7 x 7 feet in Seattle, for example; sleeping rooms must be bigger still. ... The hotels do not provide off-street parking for each room, and some of the hotels do not have enough bathrooms per room to satisfy Northwest codes (typically one per eight units). The “rooms” themselves — the capsules — are code-enforcers’ nightmares: among other things, they lack the windows, fire-safe doors, smoke detectors, and closets required of each legal bedroom in most Northwest cities. Yet Japan has many such hotels, and Japan’s fire-safety record is better than the United States’s."
occupancy limits have nothing to do with crowding: "Ten unrelated people in Meridian, Idaho, can share either a 20-bedroom mansion or a studio apartment, but eleven unrelated people may not live in either."
"Scraped clean of rationalizations, roommate caps are simple. They are tools that privileged people use to exclude from their neighborhoods people without much money, such as immigrants and students."
https://www.sightline.org/2012/12/03/emancipating-the-rooming-house/ on allowing rooming houses again (previous link is on their history), and Japan's capsule hotels as a modernized version of the old flophouse.
https://www.sightline.org/2013/01/16/servants-welcome-roommates-barred/ Perhaps the high point of a series on occupancy limits and how utterly unjustifiable they are.
Some quotes, not necessarily from those two articles:
(Racist hypocrisy of minimum space requirements) "you might expect sweeping changes in many kinds of crowded, residential buildings: military barracks, college dormitories, summer camps, prisons, single-family homes with many children, lumber camps, and crew quarters aboard ships. But the rule did not apply to these categories of housing. It applied only in neighborhoods where Chinese immigrants lived"
"In 1909, San Francisco banned most cubicle-style hotels, which was a common form of cheap lodging for itinerant workers and others on very tight budgets. The city rationalized the policy as a fire safety precaution. Had fire safety actually been the goal, the city would have demanded fire escapes, fire-slowing walls at certain intervals, and fire doors. Cubicles remained perfectly legal for offices and workshops across the city, but for sleeping? That became a code violation."
"The law now prohibits the demolition of any SROs that remain, while building codes make it impossible to build any new ones."
Why capsule hotels would be illegal here: "The “rooms” are much too small: habitable rooms may not be less than 7 x 7 feet in Seattle, for example; sleeping rooms must be bigger still. ... The hotels do not provide off-street parking for each room, and some of the hotels do not have enough bathrooms per room to satisfy Northwest codes (typically one per eight units). The “rooms” themselves — the capsules — are code-enforcers’ nightmares: among other things, they lack the windows, fire-safe doors, smoke detectors, and closets required of each legal bedroom in most Northwest cities. Yet Japan has many such hotels, and Japan’s fire-safety record is better than the United States’s."
occupancy limits have nothing to do with crowding: "Ten unrelated people in Meridian, Idaho, can share either a 20-bedroom mansion or a studio apartment, but eleven unrelated people may not live in either."
"Scraped clean of rationalizations, roommate caps are simple. They are tools that privileged people use to exclude from their neighborhoods people without much money, such as immigrants and students."